1635-The Tangled Web

by Virginia DeMarce

"Beyond that," Martin asked after a while, "how's business?"

  "I'm developing a new line," Crispin said. "Merga's idea. We haven't heard from the merchant selling the duplicating machines, yet, but then he is certainly not in Frankfurt. These things take time. I am creating a new small newspaper to circulate locally and present advertisements for things that people want. There must be many people in Frankfurt who want some item, and other people who have it but no longer want it, but who do not know one another. With the duplicating machine, now, the cost of production for these 'want ads' will be reduced a lot . . ."

  "Stop delaying, Martin," Merga said. "You have to go upstairs and say hello to Mutti."

  When Wackernagel came back down the stairs, he moaned. "You've got to do something, Merga. You absolutely have to get her off this 'settle down and get married.' Find her an avocation. A 'hobby' as the up-timers say. Some other interest."

  She looked up from the stand where she was watching Emrich Menig piece the duplicating machine together. "Getting you married and settled down is more than an avocation. It is her vocation, her calling."

  "Merga, you have got to do something." Martin's desperation was clear from the tone of his voice. "I can't settle down. Not here, not anywhere."

  "Why on earth not, Marty?"

  "Because I am married. In Erfurt. Well, in a village right outside the city. And in Vacha. And in Steinau. With calling of the banns and everything. They were all such darling girls when I met them. I couldn't bear to disappoint them, so I told the local pastors that I was an orphan from Breslau. And if any one of them finds out . . . ever. Or the church! There are a lot of really good reasons that I love the Imperial Road."

  "How many reasons?" Merga asked. She put as much "foreboding" into the tone of her voice as she could possibly squeeze through her vocal cords.

  "Besides my girls? Eight, right now."

  Merga gasped.

  Her brother gave her the grin he had used—in his older sister's opinion, with an unreasonable degree of success—to get out from under impending disciplinary measures since he was three years old. "But Maria is expecting again."

  Happy Wanderer

  Frankfurt am Main, July 1634

  "Settle down and marry. Or marry and settle down. Or marry and don't settle down—keep riding the Reichsstrasse, for all I care, though your wife may have different ideas. But marry."

  Martin Wackernagel left Frankfurt am Main with his mother's admonitions ringing in his ears. This time with the variation that now that his sister Merga and her husband Crispin Neumann had taken in "that unmanageable boy"—otherwise known as Emrich Menig—if he didn't marry and settle down, everything would, in all probability, be inherited by a stranger.

  "Emrich's not likely to be a stranger by the time we all die," which had been his first ploy, didn't go over very well.

  Neither did, "Abraham named Eliezer of Damascus, a stranger, as his heir. And Eliezer would have been, if God hadn't intervened with a miracle for Sarah. If he wants Merga to have a miracle at her age, I presume that he's still perfectly capable of giving her one."

  Nor even, "There's always Juditha." His younger sister, Juditha, almost fifteen years younger than Merga and ten years younger than himself, wasn't married yet. Nor did she come home regularly to let her mother complain about it. She had gone into service in the household of a Lutheran pastor at fourteen, followed her mistress to Strassburg when the pastor received a new call three years later, and wrote, perhaps, once every three months. If she was in the mood. Over which Mutti was greatly aggrieved, of course, moaning on and on about, "what is the point that she has saved a good dowry, above and beyond what your sainted father left for her and which I have invested so carefully and preserved from loss through the miseries of this entire war, if she shows no inclination to ask for it?"

  Once he safely made his escape from the pursuing maternal voice, he followed his regular route—extended, now, beyond what it had been a few years before. From Frankfurt am Main by way of Gelnhausen, Steinau, Fulda, Vacha, Eisenach, Erfurt, yes. He still rode that part of the Reichsstrasse, the Imperial Road. But rarely, any more, the occasional further leg to Leipzig. Rather, from Erfurt, his regular path went through Arnstadt and Badenburg to Grantville.

  Badenburg. Ah, Badenburg had many attractions. Prominent among them was a young woman named Helena Hamm. Not a girl. Wackernagel wasn't that interested in girls any more. He greatly preferred women.

  He hadn't asked, but he had a fair amount of experience in observing women. He would place Helena at twenty-five or twenty-six years old.

  Badenburg

  "Three separate damnations, may all of them fall upon your head, you shrew." Willibald Fraas jerked his head up. "You have ruined this pour, coming in and startling Dietrich like that. Freytag in Arnstadt expects delivery of these steins within a week. Whose work is it pays for the costs of this household?"

  "If you weren't so lazy, the steins would have been done last week. Last minute, everything at the last minute. You have no more sense of timeliness than a stewed prune." Agnes Bachmeierin slammed her fist down on the table where her husband and son were working.

  "Don't think to browbeat me with your shoe, you grumpy old sow."

  Helena Hamm watched the customer she had been serving leave the shop. Knowing that he had heard her stepfather and her mother. Knowing that one more story of the battles that occurred at the Sign of the Platter would go out into the gossip of Badenburg.

  If her father had not died . . .

  She shook her head impatiently.

  Her father had been dead for a decade. Her mother, the formidable Agnes Bachmeierin, had fought the pewterers' guild with every devious legal device at her disposal in order to keep the family business for her sons. She hadn't managed to avoid remarriage to another master pewterer. That had been too much to hope for. However, Georg Friedrich Hamm (the Elder, deceased) had not been an ordinary pewterer. It was a specialty shop. He had supplied orders from all over central Thuringia. The marriage contract stipulated that Willibald Fraas would run the shop only until such time as her oldest surviving son by her first husband—whichever son that might turn out to be—qualified as a master and was ready to take it over.

  Yes, her mother was clever. If Dietrich or Georg Friedrich the Younger should die or not wish to take over the shop, the daughters of her first marriage were the next in line. If neither of them had married a master pewterer, then Fraas had the first refusal right to buy the shop for any children he might have in his marriage to Agnes. Not inherit it. Buy it, at a fully and fairly assessed market price, to be split between the girls from the first marriage as their dowries. The marriage contract didn't even allow him that privilege for children of a possible second marriage, should Agnes have died without bearing him children. He would have had to compete with—bid against—any other pewterer who might be interested in the purchase.

  But Agnes had borne him four. Three, two boys and a girl, were still alive.

  There was no love lost between Willibald Fraas and his wife. There never had been.

  Love? There wasn't even any mild friendship between Willibald Fraas and his wife. There wasn't even a truce or a cease-fire, such as that which seemed likely to occur in the Netherlands very soon now.

  But . . . Helena was the oldest. She had been fifteen when her father died. She remembered perfectly well what things had been like between him and her mother.

  Exactly the way they were between her mother and stepfather. Agnes Bachmeierin was not an easy woman to live with. Especially not during those months when she suspected she was pregnant again but had not yet felt the baby's movement to confirm it. Particularly when she had no desire to be pregnant again, at all.

  Months like this month. And, probably, next month.

  "So, I suppose, whether you admit that she startled me or not, once more you will declare that my work isn't good enough." Her brother Dietrich Hamm, his voice as whiny as usual, had joined the fray in the back of the
shop. "I can see it now. No matter what I achieve, it's never going to be good enough for a masterwork, is it? And you'll use your influence with the rest of the guild to bring the others around to your point of view. In spite of the fact that my father served as guildmaster."

  "Boy, you have less brains than you do ear wax," Fraas exploded. "Your mind is like a rotten nut with no kernel."

  Dietrich was completely convinced that his stepfather was trying to exclude him from achieving his mastership. Which, Helena had to admit, was not beyond the realm of possibility. The marriage contract, combined with their father's will, ensured that Dietrich would take over. According to their provisions, if Dietrich survived another three years, Willibald Fraas would be working for his stepson.

  "Tickle-brained, clumsy, ill-nurtured—"

  "If I am badly trained, then it was you who trained me badly."

  If, of course, Dietrich had qualified as a master pewterer by then.

  If not, Fraas could hang on for another ten years, until her younger brother could qualify. Willibald was cranky, obnoxious, unpleasant, and capable of making the lives of everyone around him miserable. He was not just uninterested in the changes that Karl Schmidt was bringing to the guilds in Badenburg. He was hostile to every one of them.

  Dietrich, encouraged by his mother and the Bachmeier uncle for whom he had been named, wanted to pursue every one of them.

  But not with any real energy, much less hard work. Part of Helena had to admit that even if everything Dietrich claimed about their stepfather's intentions was entirely true, he was still basically a dissatisfied whiner and always would be.

  He wasn't a very good pewterer, either. Even if Mama hadn't disturbed him, the odds were high that the pour would have had flaws.

  Which Willibald knew.

  Which to some extent justified Mama's complaints about his having left it too long. He should have allowed for the distinct possibility that, with Dietrich involved in the project, they would need to pour these elaborate handles again.

  Martin Wackernagel paused at the door. The best description of the usual tone that he encountered when he stopped at the Sign of the Platter might be "constant sniping." Fraas provided him with a lot of commissions, but he had a nasty temper, which was most frequently directed at his wife; then at his three stepchildren; then at his own children. Not that he was a violent man—just a hostile one. Though his life as a place-holder for his stepsons couldn't be easy.

  Helena was in the retail shop when he came in. She usually was. So he smiled at her. "Over in Grantville," he said, cocking his head in the direction of the back room, "they call it 'stress.' "

  Helena was more than content to find a bit of respite from the hostilities by flirting with a good-looking courier whenever he dropped in with orders and letters. It wasn't as if anyone else was seriously courting her.

  So, Helena thought. Flirt I will. Twenty-six going on twenty-seven and no serious suitor in sight. Wackernagel was a good-looking man and she was old enough to know what she was doing. She deserved a little harmless, inexpensive entertainment delivered right to her doorstep.

  Grantville

  Since the weather was warm, Wackernagel took advantage of an outdoor "Old Folk's Music" night at the Thuringen Gardens. A man could get away with buying just one beer at the outside tables, if he sat at the edge, by the fence. With his responsibilities, he didn't have a lot of spare change most of the time.

  He leaned back, listening to the band. They'd been appearing occasionally for close to a year now. One of the women got up and made an introduction of something called, "Please help me. I'm falling in love with you." It seemed like a very long name for a song. One of the men . . . Wackernagel thought a moment. His name was Jerry Simmons. Simmons started on the plea of a lover who was asking the object of his affections to reject him.

  Wackernagel smiled into his beer. Now, that was unusual. He didn't think he'd ever heard a love song with that theme before. Mostly the lover was asking the girl to let him into her heart and her bed—not keep him out of it.

  Simmons moved on to the second verse. The man was unhappily married but determined to remain faithful. Now, wouldn't that make the priests and ministers happy? Too bad none of them seemed be here tonight. This song could be turned into a whole sermon theme. But wait. At the end of the second verse, it looked like the guy might succumb to temptation. Wackernagel perked up. Maybe it was just as well that the upstanding Pastor Ludwig Kastenmayer was safely at home in the rectory next to St. Martin's in the Fields Lutheran Church, probably reading edifying bedtime stories to his numerous preachers' kids.

  But no. The singer concludes that it would be a sin. The girl must close the door to temptation on him. Damn, what an anticlimax. Nice tune, though. He called, "Encore, encore." Which, one of the down-time mail carriers had told him, in the Thuringen Gardens, meant just what it said. Not, "sing something more." It meant, "sing it again, Sam."

  Why, "Sam?" Not a single one of the acts he had heard in Grantville had a singer named "Sam." He would have to find out when he had a chance. Before he left tomorrow, he would stop at the public library and ask.

  Jerry Simmons sang it again. Wackernagel listened, committing the tune to memory and writing the words on a piece of scratch paper. It would be an excellent song to sing to girls he wasn't really serious about.

  He couldn't afford to get serious very many more times. His income was stretched about as far as it would go, even with Maria's market garden for the Erfurt trade, what Rufina could bring in with her spinning and hostel for travelers, and the fact that Edeltraud had been able to continue on as a waitress when her father's inn was sold after his death.

  He could sing it to Helena Hamm in Badenburg on his way home. It was a very pretty song.

  Fulda

  The gossip in the Fulda Barracks was better than that in Fulda itself. Things were pretty quiet, though, in spite of the Ram Rebellion going on in the other sections of Franconia. Dagmar, Sergeant Hartke's wife, said that the main concern of the soldiers was whether or not it would extend into Stift Fulda, since it was certainly lively enough down around Würzburg and Bamberg. And whether they will be allowed to go out and shoot some peasants if it did. Life had been dull.

  Martin taught them his new song, admitting that he didn't know whether it was a "genuine Hank Williams" or not. The woman who introduced the singer hadn't said, and he'd forgotten to ask that when he stopped at the library to find out about "Sam."

  As a kind of consolation prize, he treated Dagmar and the sergeant to a synopsis of the plot of Casablanca. One nice thing about regular visits to Grantville was that a man always came out with something to trade. Not goods—he was a courier, not a merchant. But ideas.

  Badenburg, August 1634

  By the time Martin got to Badenburg again, the kidnaping of Clara Bachmeierin in Stift Fulda was old news. Old, but crucial to the household in which Helena Hamm resided. Clara was her aunt, the sister of the inestimably belligerent Agnes. So he delivered all the information he had gathered.

  "It's not that we don't care about the other people that the SoTF sent over there," Helena said, "but none of the rest of them are related to us. What do you really think?"

  "They're doing their best." What else did he have to say?

  From the back room, the apparently interminable family squabble flew on. This time, a new voice. A young one. Screaming, "But I don't want to apprentice as a pewterer. I don't want to spend my life molding tableware and figurines. I want to stay at the Latin school and then go to the university."

  "Want, want, want. Why should it make any difference what you want, you little pipsqueak? Did anyone ask me what I wanted? Metals are important."

  "The only metal I want to deal with is those new steel pen nibs that they're making in Jena, now. I want one for my stylus. Or . . ."

  Helena sighed. "Jergfritz. My younger brother. Georg Friedrich Hamm, the Younger."

  Wackernagel grinned. "Just as charming as yo
ur other brother, I perceive."

  "Willibald has no patience with him. But Dietrich doesn't, either. Dietrich knows that if he should die, and all men are mortal, perhaps more so in the middle of this war than in a time of peace, then Fraas will have another ten years of controlling the shop before Jergfritz is old enough to take over. By that time, my stepfather will be close to sixty and a daily routine of pouring hot metal may have lost some of its appeal. So Dietrich is convinced that my stepfather's nefarious plot is to shut him out in favor of his younger brother."

  They could still hear invisible dialogue going on.

  "You want to be a pen-pusher instead of a respectable tradesman? Scribbling your life away instead of making something useful? It's high time for you to be articled."

  "Or a key," Jergfritz yelled back. "I'd be willing to deal with a piece of metal if it was a key to my office in a fine government building."

  Martin flirted a little longer and then proceeded along his route to Grantville. Where the news arrived that all was well in Fulda, the SoTF administrators having been retrieved.

  Which, he hoped, might improve the general mood of the Fraas/Bachmeierin/Hamm household in Badenburg. But he doubted it.

  On the Road Again

  September 1634

  In Grantville this time, he also discovered that the mayor, Henry Dreeson, was planning a "good will tour" of Buchenland, which would culminate in Frankfurt. And which would involve him.

  That was genuinely new news. He stopped in Badenburg, where he told Helena. He stopped in Bindersleben bei Erfurt, where he told Maria. He stopped in Vacha, where he told Rufina. He stopped in Fulda and at the Fulda Barracks, where he saw Sergeant Hartke, Dagmar, David Kronberg, other friends, and picked up messages to be delivered to the Hanauer rabbi and to Meier zum Schwan in Frankfurt. He stopped in Steinau, where he told Edeltraud.